Education, Geographies of

Studies of geographies of education explore the complex interactions between education, space, and civil society. The topic is distinct from geographic education, which deals primarily with the teaching and learning of geography as a subject. In recent years a vibrant resurgence in this field has resulted in a growing body of work, theoretically and empirically dispersed within the discipline itself. Critical studies within this broader realm are concerned primarily with social justice, power relations, and structural inequities relating to or emanating from the educational system and have drawn on Marxist, feminist, and poststructuralist approaches to explore wide-ranging topics.

Educational spaces are imbued with multiple purposes and meanings, with the ideologies of the state and its corresponding discursive and material realities becoming discernible. As a lifelong learning process, education is an ongoing activity tied to the production and consumption of knowledge. Including early childhood education, primary to secondary schooling, postsecondary institutions, formal to informal learning, and collective to individualized prospects, the geographies of education reflect various sites and scales of opportunities to investigate an array of geographical concerns. As democratic public spheres, public schools are sites for justice, equality, freedom, and social transformation. Ronald Manzer defines schools as human communities, public instruments, and political symbols and the means by which people in a political democracy collectively strive for civic virtue, economic wealth, and cultural survival. Apart from its educational mandate, these are places where neighborhood integration, social capital formation, and the fostering of civil society are ideally endorsed. The city-school relationship is also intrinsically linked to the planning and sustainability of urban regions through the quality and vibrancy of its educational institutions. Cities provide the context for communities of difference and have brought educational institutions to the forefront of these debates as sites of empowerment and social cohesion. In the smaller towns, the threat of declining populations and out-migration due to the closure of manufacturing plants and resource-based industries has had detrimental effects on the educational prospects of these places. In rural areas, schools provide one of the few opportunities for community engagement and civic participation, and the threat of school closures has widespread and long-term implications on the well-being of its citizenry.

Critical scholars have long argued, however, that in capitalist societies, educational spaces are sites of cultural and social reproduction succumbing to dominant class value systems. Relegating the educational sphere to the logics of the market and the pursuit of profit—for instance, the call for privatization and choice and the streamlining of the production of knowledge into professional, vocational, and technically trained workers—signals the manipulation of workers into complacency and servitude to capitalist regimes. These forms of institutional discrimination practices are reflected in the spatial segregation and redlining of schools, particularly along racial, class, gender, and disability divides. Similarly, the system of education that was imposed on indigenous peoples by colonial and neocolonial powers led to the historical and spatial processes of their marginalization, dependency, and humiliation. These exclusionary practices in turn have led to spaces of stigmatization and subversion and to the demoralizing and silencing of many marginalized communities. Spaces of education, however, are also sites of contestation, resistance, and possibility. As Ronald Manzer notes, public schools are not only the objects of domination and the products of compromise, [Page 875]they are also potentially agencies for creating political consensus. Thus, despite the numerous obstacles faced through the experience of marginality, scholars in this field demonstrate that the collective consciousness and political agency generated within the spaces of education can also provide a public venue for social struggle and transformation. In Paulo Freire's classic, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he notes that there is no such thing as a “neutral educational process,” and studies in geographies of education highlight its inherent political nature and corresponding spaces of contrasts and contradictions.

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